Great piece in the Lawyerist. To use a recent boxing analogy Lexis are the Klitschko of the legal research world but eventually they will go down in the 11th round to the young turk.
We suggest it’s about round 7 in 2017. Just as an add, we suspect Klitschko is actually much nicer than Lexis and the newer research services won’t be paying Lexis the same respect as Joshua did to the older boxer.
Here’s how they introduce their piece we really recommend reading on
There’s a lot of competition in the legal research market these days. Back in the day, it was just Westlaw. Then it was Westlaw and LexisNexis. Bloomberg Law came along relatively recently, trying to edge into the market of lawyers who are willing to pay a lot for their research needs. But for the rest of us, upstarts like Fastcase, CaseText, and Casemaker have provided lower-cost solutions.
Even Google Scholar—which is completely free—lets you keyword search a large body of federal and state reported cases and filter results by court.
The ABA lists alternatives like Fastcase for research, and even BigLaw feeder schools like Harvard provide a list of alternative legal research options. The most recent Clio users survey saw Fastcase, LexisNexis, and Westlaw in a dead heat.
Now, LexisNexis is apparently running scared and taking direct shots at Casemaker, Fastcase, and Google Scholar.
Link to article to see lexis tweet https://lawyerist.com/155916/lexisnexis-comes-swinging-lower-cost-legal-research-services/
It’s a weird bit of framing. Basically, the attack is “only LexisNexis has what LexisNexis has”—summaries, headnotes, etc.1 But that overlooks the idea that many lawyers don’t actually need or want those things, and they certainly don’t want to pay for them. If your practice is concentrated in one area, if you don’t need cases from every jurisdiction imaginable, if you don’t use law reviews, then something like Lexis can be overkill.
More at link above
